Telematics: The aftermarket’s next hurdle

shutterstock_335070287Heavy-duty trucking’s technological renaissance is about the shake up the aftermarket. Again.

The right to repair debate might be solved, but the independent aftermarket’s fight to access vehicle maintenance information is only beginning.

Another issue lingers on the horizon.

What is the aftermarket going to do about telematics?

Telematics products were first introduced in the trucking industry in the late 1980s to aid in vehicle monitoring and logistics. Originally aftermarket hardware, these first telematics systems created a revolutionary level of transparency between drivers and fleet dispatchers.

By knowing where their trucks were located at all times, fleets were able to optimize scheduling, route efficiency and asset utilization.

“The early systems were very much track and trace, says Jimmy Fortuna, vice president of product management at Omnitracs.

In the decades since, more telematics providers have emerged and the capabilities of their products have increased.

Logistics remain a priority but now share the spotlight with asset and driver usage data, fuel economy information and live vehicle maintenance reports, says Garland Jackson, general manager – OEM at PeopleNet.

What started as a solution to fleets’ logistical questions has evolved to answer so much more, says Velociti President Deryk Powell.

“At a base level [telematics] is still ‘Where is my truck?’ but in truth it’s so much more than that. It’s also ‘How is my truck doing?’ ‘What kind of shape is it in?’” Powell says. “[Telematics] is a total connectivity of a driver and a truck” to its terminal and/or dispatcher.

The uptime potential of that connectivity is enormous, and as such, North American fleets have started to take note.

Asset tracking and hours-of-service monitoring with electronic on-board recorders (EOBR) still account for the lion’s share of telematics usage within North American fleets. But the popularity of maintenance-centric products—available through factory and retrofit installation—are growing.

And that market proliferation has only increased of late, Fortuna says.

“There has been a pretty rapid uptake [in adoption] in the past two years, especially in the last year or so, and we think it is only going to accelerate from here,” he says.

“For a long time telematics were just being used by the big fleets, but in the last 24 to 30 months fleets of every shape and size have started to adopt systems,” adds Powell. “That has really changed the landscape.”

Once its advantages are fully realized, telematics will revolutionize heavy-duty trucking maintenance across all service channels.

A recent study by ABI Research determined “it is just a matter of time” before the first United States’ commercial telematics provider exceeds one million vehicles under management. The study also predicts telematics software will be present on more than 73 million vehicles worldwide by 2020.

This is technology that isn’t going to remain on the backburner much longer.

The maintenance upside of telematics is driven from data acquisition.

By recording vehicle performance and fault codes, telematics providers have access to expansive amounts of maintenance-related records. Zonar Systems COO Vikas Jain says his company works in conjunction with its OEM partners to analyze the data it collects to uncover trends across specific vehicle configurations and duty cycles.

Jain says this research is particularly valuable in determining the severity of fault codes.

Not every fault code immediately requires service, and trends found within data allow telematics providers to advise customers on if they need to pull over immediately, within a number of hours, or if a fault code has possibly been presented in error.

“When a driver sees a check engine light, he might not know what that means,” says Jain. “But we capture that fault code and can see exactly what it says … and what it means.”

Fortuna gives OEMs credit for this opportunity, as every new ECU installed on a vehicle enhances the data set from which a telematics system can analyze.

“You can get a much better picture of what is going on within a vehicle overall when you look at all of those systems in combination,” he says.

In cases where the maintenance issue requires downtime, Jackson says the amount of data that can be immediately transferred to necessary parties is enormous. Everything from asset information (VIN, model year, spec’ing information, etc.) to ECU data on system and component performance is automatically communicated to fleets through today’s telematics systems.

Dealer service departments can receive this information, too. OEMs have the ability to route maintenance information gleaned though factory-installed telematics systems to a fleet’s preferred dealer service facility, Jain says.

Decisiv Vice President of Channel Marketing Michael Riemer says the time-saving benefits of this communication are two-fold. Either the fleet or dealer is required to manually record the asset information at the beginning of the repair, and by providing fault code information in advance, the service department gets a head start on diagnosing the problem.

“It allows you to get the right information into the right hands,” he says.

And Powell says that’s just the beginning. As vehicle ECU technology continues to grow, so too will the amount of data mined from these systems. A world where telematics providers can leverage comprehensive component, system and fleet data against live asset reports to predict future problems is just around the corner.

Prognostics is the future of fleet maintenance, and telematics will make it possible.

“We can analyze data trends and in certain cases we can anticipate faults before they actually happen,” says Jain. “We can find where there is a high probability of a certain kind of fault, and with the OEM, we can notify the fleet” of the potential breakdown risk.

“If something happens repetitively, that’s probably an area you want to address,” adds Jackson.

Fortuna says telematics also will supplement the industry’s burgeoning interest in vehicle autonomy, collecting and distributing data to track vehicle movement and the performance of collision avoidance systems.

Telematics won’t eliminate downtime, but coupled with prognostics and autonomics, it will unquestionably minimize it.

Yet how the independent aftermarket figures into this uptime revolution remains to be seen.

Most data transferred using telematics goes directly to vehicle owners. OEMs guide fleets with factory-installed telematics systems to dealers when relevant, but the service provider only acquires the information if the fleet agrees to outsource the work.

At this point the independent aftermarket is out of the loop.

Jain says there is application program interface (API) technology available today to allow telematics providers to transfer data to independent service provider systems. He says both dealer and independent service facilities are the logical next step for the proliferation of telematics data.

The reason only the former is seeing the fruits of this technology isn’t an industry bias or preference, it’s simple economics. Jain says heavy-duty OEMs have financially committed to telematics. They’ve allocated funds to analyzing data as a way to help customers.

“I think OEMs are going to continue to add more to what they provide,” adds Riemer. “I think they understand to drive uptime they need to do more from a predictive perspective. They need to be thinking ahead for their customers. They recognize that and are moving in that direction.”

The independent aftermarket hasn’t yet done the same.

The recently signed heavy-duty access to vehicle information Memorandum of Understanding offers the independent aftermarket a substantial amount of proprietary vehicle system information but lacks any guidance regarding telematics.

Commercial Vehicle Right to Repair Coalition leaders said OEMs showed a willingness to tackle telematics at a future date when the MOU was confirmed, but a timeline for those discussions is unknown.

In the meantime vehicle owner reliance on telematics will only continue to grow.

Powell says he believes fleets who understand the potential of telematics will only continue to leverage the technology in relationships with suppliers. That will include an expectation from OEMs to offer data analysis, prognostics and an open channel of maintenance information to all service providers.

Offering the latter at cost to the independent aftermarket seems the most logical and beneficial solution for the industry, Riemer says.

“Information sharing is valuable for everyone in the ecosystem,” he says.

And now that the technology is available, Fortuna says it isn’t going away.

“Telematics is now a data transport for a lot of things going on within the vehicle, and as time goes by I think the line between telematics and the functionalities [such as maintenance] it enables will become even blurrier,” he says. “In the future, the idea that a vehicle wouldn’t be connected with telematics will just be weird.”

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